On 2022-12-31, Chris Woolf wrote:
It has always struck me that we can indeed adapt remarkably quickly to local changes in our personal HTRF, and that therefore this needs to be considered as a dynamic affair, rather than a purely static one.
By the way, there are even more remarkable examples of that adaptability in psychophysics. Perhaps the most dramatic I know of is the one of inverting goggles. Apparently, if you consistently wear a headset which flips your vision upside down, in about two to three weeks your circuits adjust to compensate, and then back again once you stop the experiment. That happens even if you're an adult, so that this is not an example of early childhood, low level plasticity and the irreversibility that comes with it. (Pace kittens only shown vertical stripes and that sort of thing.)
So how much precision is really needed for an HRTF? And how inaccurate can it be for our normal correction ability to deal with it?
Perhaps even more to the point, what precisely are the mechanisms which enable us to compensate like that? Because if we really understood what they are, maybe we could take conscious advantage of them, to rapidly train people to work with a generalized HRTF set, instead of going the hard way of measuring or modelling individualized head, torso and pinna responses.
One obvious answer is feedback. I'd argue the main reason head tracking works so well is that we're tuned to correlate how we move with the sensory input provoked by the movement. That's for instance how children appear to learn first occlusion and then by extension object constancy. In audition, I've had the pleasure of trying out a research system in which different kinds of head tracked binaural auralization methods were available for side by side comparison. The system worked surprisingly well even with no HRTF's applied, but just amplitude and delay variation against an idealized pair of point omni receivers. I also adapted to it *really* fast, like in ten minutes or so.
But is there more? Head tracking, especially in a directionally solid and low latency form, isn't exactly an over the counter solution yet. So could you perhaps at least partially substitute the learning from feedback with something like synchronized visual or tactile cues, in a training session? Because if you could, you'd suddenly gain a lower cost yet at least somewhat effective version of binaural rendering; there would be money to be made.
-- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - de...@iki.fi, http://decoy.iki.fi/front +358-40-3751464, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2 _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
